This month, we will be writing on the Travel Kettle with Car Cigarette Lighter Adapter submitted by Matthew Woodford
Some inventions are so gloriously pointless you wonder whether they were designed as satire. Exhibit A: the travel kettle with a car cigarette lighter adapter. On paper, it sounds genius. You’re on the road, craving a brew, and voilà, plug in your trusty little kettle, and five minutes later you’ve got boiling water.
The Reality
Except not. The “five minutes” bit is a bold-faced lie. The car kettle is powered by the same cigarette lighter socket that once struggled to keep your Nokia 3310 alive after Snake marathons. Now it’s somehow expected to summon the energy of a small power station to boil half a litre of water. That’s like asking your office Wi-Fi to stream Netflix in 4K while you’re on a Zoom call with 37 open tabs, theoretically possible, practically laughable.
Actual test results show it takes around 45 minutes to reach a rolling boil. Yes, 45 minutes, long enough to finish a true-crime podcast, miss your motorway exit, and seriously question your life choices. That’s assuming your car battery doesn’t give up halfway, because leaving it running too long basically turns your engine into a £500 kettle stand. And when the tea is finally “ready,” chances are you’ll already be at your destination or stranded on the hard shoulder, calling the AA to explain that you broke down chasing a lukewarm Earl Grey.
It gets worse.
These kettles are marketed as safety devices, “Never go without a hot drink on a long journey!” But stopping at literally any petrol station, services, or lay-by café will get you faster, cheaper, and definitely hotter tea. The car kettle is less a gadget and more an endurance trial: “How badly do you want this lukewarm coffee?”
Because pointless tech has consequences. It adds to the mountain of e-waste, clutters cupboards, and embodies the worst kind of design thinking: inventing a solution to a problem that never existed. Nobody in the history of motoring has said, “If only I could spend an hour boiling water in the glove compartment.”
The Tech Ledger verdict?
Utterly useless. Not just bad tech, but actively misleading tech. If you’re after portable boiling water, stick with a flask. Or better yet, embrace the radical notion of stopping at a café. Your sanity, your car battery, and the planet will thank you.